


A Mountain Of His Life

by micehell



Category: Stargate - All Series
Genre: AU (meet in college), Angst, Drama, M/M, Pre-Series, it's not HEA but not horrendously sad either
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-14
Updated: 2009-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 03:23:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/micehell/pseuds/micehell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's learned not to ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mountain Of His Life

**Author's Note:**

> For the title I went old school this time, with The Fixx.

Cam supposes there's a physics equation that could explain why soap bubbles float the way they do. Or a chemistry formula to determine their composition. Even an English verse that could wax poetic about the sheen and whimsy of them. He figures he'd have to hit Advanced Psychology, though, before he'd find anything that would explain why his roommate had given up studying his Physics, Chemistry, and English homework in order to blow lazy lines of soap bubbles across their room, and even that isn't a guarantee. John is... unique.

"Why are you blowing bubbles instead of studying?" Cam can't help but ask. He's always been the type to jump to the end of the book, just to find out what's happening.

John doesn't say anything, just blows softly through the garishly red, dripping circle of the wand, and Cam is disturbed by how obscene it seems to him, a far too appealing taint on the stuff of childhood.

He waits, but John just smiles, his motives hanging in the air like the bubbles, so fragile they could burst at any moment.

Cam goes back to his homework, burying himself in the physics of movement, of flight. He ignores the bubble that lights on his text (pink/green/blue shiny), as ephemeral as the moment.

John runs out of bubbles eventually, drifts off to sleep, soft and blurred and larger than their constrained life against the too-small dorm room twin.

Cam smiles down at him, at the knobby knees showing beneath the board shorts that John insists on wearing anytime he doesn't have to wear his AROTC uniform. He pulls the crumpled sheets up over those knees, against the encroaching chill of the evening. From here he can see the neatly squared pages of homework, fanned over John's desk. Each subject is separate, rotated out fifteen degrees, and filled with John's sloping hand. It was obviously done long before Cam had even finished his first subject, and he sighs. He wonders, again, why a guy so obviously intelligent pretends not to have a thought in his head except for surfing, football, and planes.

He groans as he looks over the work _he_ still has to do. He starts in on it, grounded and determined, easy in his own intelligence, with one last look at the enigma he rooms with.

He's learned not to ask.

~*~

The waiting room is medium-sized, with slightly worn furniture, month old magazines, and a bored receptionist whose hair makes her taller than Cam, even though her body is a good 4 inches shorter. It's nothing the Air Force would have chosen, so it must be one of the University's on-call therapists.

Cam sits there, waiting for the doctor to finally be ready to see them, even though it's fifteen minutes past their scheduled time. He hates waiting, hates it even more when he's followed the rules someone else has set. If you add on to that the fact he doesn't want to be here at all... Cam reads an old copy of Cosmo, foot tapping impatiently, determinedly considering if you really can get a dick an extra inch down your throat if you just tilt your head back a little more.

The receptionist has apparently given up waiting for the doctor, heading back further into office complex without a word, leaving him and John and the magazines to entertain themselves.

John isn't reading, though. He's picked up some markers from the half-empty toybox at the side of the couch and is filling in the weave of the wicker pattern on his chair with a complex series of overlapping colors. It's symmetrical, and some kind of repeating pattern, but Cam doesn't have John's trick of being able to spot mathematical series at a glance. He can't guess what numbers are running through John's head now.

"Hey, are you trying to get us in more trouble? Mandated therapy isn't good enough for you, you want some kind of vandalism notice on your record?"

The coloring doesn't stop, but John shrugs in answer. "I'm doing them a favor. I mean, look at this place. It's so beige I keep thinking I'm going to go snow blind. It's like the Monochromatic Graveyard, where all things beige go to die."

It is amazingly beige; Cam has to give him that. But this is still just John being an ass.

Not that Cam doesn't understand; he doesn't want to be here either. What happened to Vickers was bad, it was totally fubar, and he's still dreaming about it even three weeks later. But they've filed all their mission reports, they've gone over it in detail, and even the Air Force is sure that it was a freak accident, nothing that was likely to happen again. Talking about it's not going to change anything. Vickers will still be dead, and there'll still be nothing Cam or the rest of them can do about it.

Cam is breathing harder, just thinking about it. Knowing he'll have to talk about the survival training that had gone so badly wrong is stirring it up, and the beige around him is too much right then. Too much like the dirt and dust of the desert, and the camo they'd been wearing. The colors John is filling in against all that beige break it up, break Cam out of it. He sighs, his leg jerking again (tap tap tap) as he waits.

He throws the Cosmo back on the table and watches John being an ass instead. It's oddly fascinating, because Cam doesn't think it comes naturally to him. It's like he's practicing, trying to get it just right.

Trying to prove something to someone. Not that Cam knows that for sure; that's just a guess. And he's learned not to ask.

~*~

Cam has seen John surf countless weekends; bright and sunny, cold and windy, it doesn't matter to John. Cam is always amazed by the long lines, the flexibility of his body. He's seen John jump with his skateboard, taking the board up with him as if they were whole, both of them breaking gravity's hold as if by will alone. John's a klutz when he just walks around their dorm room, but on the boards, either of them, he's graceful in a way that's breathtaking.

And now Cam's seeing John on a bicycle. He'd been expecting something from the Tour de France, but the only French thing about it is the homage to old Jerry Lewis routines (only actually funny). Cam winds up falling off his bike, he's laughing so hard.

John pouts for effect, but his lips are tilting up at the edges. "Fuck off, man. I just haven't been on a bike since I was a kid. My old man kept promising he'd show me..." John trails off, honking the horn on his bike like he's foregone Jerry Lewis in favor of Harpo Marx.

It's the most revealing thing John's ever said about his family in the two years that Cam's known him. Usually that's okay, because Cam can talk enough about his family for any two people (his dad alone is cool as hell). But even over the noise of John's attempt to distract him, Cam can feel that little slip in John's guard like a fish to a lure, and he can't help but bite.

"Your dad not around a lot then?"

Cam asks the question quietly, a soft foray against the breach in the wall, but John just shrugs it away. It's not that he's even practicing to be an asshole again; it's just John shoving his past behind him again, his face tilted until his eyes are hidden by hair more than a shade past regulation.

Sure, Cam can ask again, can keep going until John finally talks to him. Cam's not sure if that would be good or bad, though. He's never had an emotion he couldn't face, at least eventually, so he doesn't really know what it's like to want (to _wish_ ) to feel like something else.

And he really has learned not to ask.

~*~

John's spread out over the cheap hotel bed, the sweat on his back a mix of Cam's and his own, his hips grinding into the pillow under them as Cam rocks into him hard. Here John's not the too smart asshole, the surfer boy with the troubled past. Here John is just ass and cock, sweat and semen, pleasure and need.

"Please, Cam, please." And John isn't even really begging anymore, _please_ and _Cam_ more like half-remembered words from another lifetime, all slurring together as he flexes around Cam's dick, as he tries to take him in a little deeper.

And Cam wants to be there, wants to sink into John so deep that he can't find his way out. Wants to remember nothing but _John_ and _heat_ and _pleasure_ until his heart beats with them.

But as his daddy always said, good times are like life; they never last. And Cam can't stop the rush of _good_ that hits him like the world's best anvil, leaving him so dazed that he can barely remember to pull John back to him, to palm him hard and fast until he jerks around Cam's softening dick, pushing him out. They both collapse then; too tired, too fucked out, to mind the scratchy sheets under them, or the way their sweat is cooling too fast in the overenthusiastically air-conditioned room.

John's already mostly asleep, his face too young in the low light, in the freedom that sleep brings. Cam looks at him, feeling old and oddly protective for no real reason. It's just that when John's like this, soft and real (not the enigma, not the asshole, not the officer he's going to be), Cam thinks he might love him. Thinks that John might love him back.

He wonders what it would be like to fuck themselves asleep for thousands of nights. For a lifetime. What it would be like to be able to say, _I want to wake up beside you every morning._

But they're both far too aware of what they've joined, of what it means. And Cam hasn't just learned not to ask; he's learned not to tell.

~*~

Monday morning on the way to class, John has on his perpetual board shorts and a golf club in his hands. "I'm thinking about taking up golf," he says, like this isn't a non-sequitur for pretty much his whole life.

Cam thinks this is just another one of John's _ignore the man behind the curtain_ diversions. He thinks it's a waste of time they could be spending together. He thinks of a lot of things that make his heart hurt a little, and he clutches his hands into fists to keep from touching anything he's not supposed to out here in the light of this beautiful (harsh and real) Northern California day.

All he says is, "Sounds good."

/story


End file.
